My biggest concern has been if the image that I was restoring from was 100% valid. To date, mine have been. (My imaging software allows verification of the image after it's created so that helps alot in the peace of mind department.) I have never had an issue and I have restored at least a couple dozen times...

My biggest concern has been if the image that I was restoring from was 100% valid. To date, mine have been. (My imaging software allows verification of the image after it's created so that helps alot in the piece of mind department.) I have never had an issue and I have restored at least a couple dozen times...

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I had a restore problem with a trial version of Acronis True Image 9 back in 2005. Early releases of TI 9 were very buggy.

No problems with more recent releases, except that I cannot restore a drive from within Windows, only from the rescue CD, otherwise, I get a BSOD.

Indeed, I used to also backup using GHost 10, but stopped doing that on 3 Nov 2006.

Another issue to keep in mind with respect to restoring old images or backups is your drive geometry. If you have changed your drive geometry (i.e. active partition, number of partitions, partition order, boot order, partition drive letters, etc.) since making your image/backup then you "may" be restoring a geometry that is inconsistent with the current drive layout - depending on what/where you are restoring to.

Thus, a perfectly "good" image/backup can appear to fail by exhibiting quite an array of broken links, broken or incorrect paths, incorrect boot.ini information, bad partition tables, multiple active partitions, etc. If you really need some particular data or files, try mounting the image and copying the files or try restoring/copying only the specific files you need to a temporary folder - rather than attempting a true "restore". That way you are avoiding dealing with partition/drive geometry issues.

My horrible restore, was to a new Seagate HDD, from a sudden failure of the old Samsung HDD. The new drive was formatted to NTFS & had nothing on it, so hardware/software compatibility, seems not to fit. The imaging software used was Acronis 10 latest build. I have never seen Acronis complain on "validation" & the image used to restore, shows no problems, validation wise, post restore. Acronis fails to respond at, the forum & email support is very poor. Like, ask a direct question & they respond see "knowledge base" reply "answer not found, in knowledge base" Acronis seems not interested.

The amount of fixing & troubleshooting I've done "post image" it would have been easier to reinstall the apps. from the original disks. Now with a healthy HDD, I have to ask:

1. Should I look for other backup software.
2. I'm very reluctant to do another Acronis restore, because of the problems & poor help from Acronis
3. What reasonable expectations should I have, using any image software.
a) no errors should occur
b) some errors should occur
c) my list of problems is typical, when using image software

Also the backup & restore took place using a Seagate (2 month old) ext. HDD.
Also this was my very first experience, restoring from an image. In part based on the responses, from this I will either give Acronis another chance, or move on to another backup/restore strategy!

Hello,
Well I did resotre on both Linux and Windows system partition, it worked well. No clashes with MBR / GRUB. Worked fine. I think ATI is a very good program. Cause isn't it said: "Love thy imaging programme and it shalt love thee."
Mrk

All of them have worked fine for me. I generally like to image from the Recovery CD, so my hard drive is inactive. The program I have most confidence in is ShadowProtect, althought that is somewhat subjective ,as neither have let me down.

I also have to admit the first restore was a bit scary, but with FDISR to back me up I plunged in.

I also have discovered with a lot of testing, that there were certain scenario's where verifying was okay, browsing the image was okay, but I couldn't restore the image. So alas the only way to be sure, is to try it.

What gave me the confidence to try the first time, was knowing with FDISR, and a recovery cd or Windows CD I could recover regardless. The layering concept again.